I have no concept of time, which is both great and awful. For example, I’ve been married for twenty-seven years, but it doesn’t feel like it. It doesn’t feel like hardly any time has passed at all. My lack of time-knowledge has been with me my entire life.

When I was a kid, my family moved a lot. When asked how long I lived in one place or another, I couldn’t say, narrowing it down to “a minute” if somewhat of a prolonged time, or else “just a second” if less. This lack of time awareness fascinated my husband when we first met and frustrated him when I would inevitably arrive late whenever we met somewhere. 

The great thing about a lack of time is that I’m rarely bored. I don’t wait around because I don’t realize I’m waiting. 

The awful part about time marching on without boundaries or limits is how quickly my kids have suddenly grown up and how, poof! I have grown old. And nothing is a more powerful reminder of age than exercising!

I exercise every day, seven days a week, a health kick I’ve accidentally started. Usually, my exercise consists of a quick warm-up on the elliptical machine and then strength training a sagging body part. 

According to my Apple watch, I have completed my activity rings—three rings representing how much movement, exercise, and earned sitting time per hour per day via calories burned—a whooping ninety-four days in a row. Yay me! Whatever that means.

However, three months straight of the same old, same old, has gotten stale, even for me. So, to shake things up, this morning I decided to join a Zumba class. I dashed to my gym, dumped my backpack in the back corner of the classroom, and began gyrating. I haven’t gyrated in twelve billion years!

My hips moaned as Latin music echoed against the room’s wooden floors and mirrored walls. As Pitbull sang, my neck, wrenched from having slept wrong last night, seemed to completely detach from my vertebrae.

My arms didn’t know how to keep a steady beat while my legs did their own thing, coming to a stop (out of the blue) or else jumping up cricket-style for no rhyme or reason. 

Luckily, everyone in class accepted me there, at least they were careful of keeping their distance. Even the instructor flashed me a smile of encouragement as I grape-vined in the wrong direction or shuffle-ball-changed when drop-it-like-it’s-hot was called for. Still, I did it!

When sixty minutes was up—at least that’s what the clock said, but my wheezing, frantically beating heart, and brain fog, swore it had been nothing less than five and a half hours—the class ended. I limped out of the gym to my car, happy. I felt alive!

What’s my point?

It’s terrifying to do things knowing there is a possibility of mass failure, but it’s also what makes life interesting, what gives someone a reason to continue—to move forward and to try!

Going to this class and dancing like everyone was watching (because who wouldn’t notice a spastic, off-kilter, and offbeat middle-aged woman seemingly doing some type of convulsion therapy?) but doing it anyway is a wonderful way to live! And I am committed to doing it more often—that is, if I can find the time.